EVENTS

Support the Freedom of the Press Foundation

I am a big supporter of WikiLeaks and similar organizations that seek to increase government transparency. I contributed money until credit card agencies refused to allow payments to it, because of fear of offending the US government. I now hear of an excellent new organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation that works towards increasing government transparency by encouraging whistleblowers and investigative journalism.

This organization enables you to send money to four groups: WikiLeaks, The National Security Archive, MuckRock News and The UpTake. I had heard of the first two, both of which do first rate work, but not the other two. You can choose how to distribute your contribution to these groups.

The names of the board and staff can be seen here. Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is on the board as is actor John Cusack, documentarian Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald who explains the project here. As he says:

We intend to raise funds ourselves and then distribute it to the beneficiaries we name. The first group of beneficiaries includes WikiLeaks. We can circumvent those extra-legal, totally inappropriate blocks that have been imposed on the group. We can enable people to support WikiLeaks without donating directly to it by donating to this new organization that will then support a group of deserving independent journalism outlets, one of which is WikiLeaks. In sum, we will render impotent the government’s efforts to use its coercive pressure over corporations to suffocate not only WikiLeaks but any other group it may similarly target in the future.

We cannot depend on the regular media to aggressively expose governmental wrongdoing.

I just sent in a donation.

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Comments

“credit card agencies refused to allow payments to it, because of fear of offending the US government”
I’m bothered by this overall tactic. The transparent way and legitimate use of governmental power is to pass laws and enact treaties. Asking or pushing credit card companies to deny transactions seems like an end run on that process. Given usual standing rules and the general desire for ‘undesirables’ to keep anonymity (and likely even to stay outside of the US territory), they are left with little redress from the courts.